With the growing number of South African companies engaging in social media (SM), Sentient Communications has launched a new service - social media policy development.
As a leading technology PR company with a focus on business-to-business communications, its programme is a thought-provoking and thorough examination of a business and how it can navigate the online minefields of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Yammer and others.
Key topics:
Audiences and channels: who are you talking to, and where are they online
Monitoring and tracking techniques and standards
Who responds to what, when, and why
Response times and escalation paths
Best practices in the various SM channels
Tone, language and content
Organisational structures and allocation of responsibilities
“It's counter-intuitive, but to get the most out of social media, the most free-wheeling, shoot-from-the-hip, unstructured and ‘anything goes' medium, you need to sit down and think through structures,” explains Roger Hislop, head of Sentient Digital, “Just putting down a few simple rules can make all the difference between spinning your wheels online and getting lasting business benefit.”
Examples
It believes the core social media policy should be simple, outlining a few principles and defining a voice as the Internet changes so quickly that a cookbook approach becomes outdated within weeks or months.
But behind this policy, a great deal of thinking needs to be done, as enormous brand damage can be done with a few clicks by an over-zealous individual (such as a junior at Habitat using Twitter hashtags on political crisis in Iran to build rank. Part of this thinking involves legal or HR implications, training requirements for those who want to be online ambassadors, monitoring and tracking, and more.
“The company has two very valuable areas of experience that clients can benefit from. We understand the Internet culture and technologies involved; and we do a lot of work helping clients with internal communications. This means we understand how people work and relate to each other within a corporate environment, how decisions are made, how people take on tasks. This focus on the individuals is what makes social media in business thrive,” Hislop concludes.
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